Holly Roose

Between 1940 and 2010, the black population of the American West grew from 710,400 to 7 million. With that explosive growth has come a burgeoning interest in the history of the African American West—an interest reflected in the remarkable range and depth of the works collected in Freedom’s Racial Frontier. Editors Herbert G. Ruffin II and Dwayne A. Mack have gathered established and emerging scholars in the field to create an anthology that links past, current, and future generations of African American West scholarship.

The volume’s sixteen chapters address the African American experience within the framework of the West as a multicultural frontier. The result is a fresh perspective on western-U.S. history, centered on the significance of African American life, culture, and social justice in almost every trans-Mississippi state. Examining and interpreting the twentieth century while mindful of events and developments since 2000, the contributors focus on community formation, cultural diversity, civil rights and black empowerment, and artistic creativity and identity. Reflecting the dynamic evolution of new approaches and new sites of knowledge in the field of western history, the authors consider its interconnections with fields such as cultural studies, literature, and sociology. Some essays deal with familiar places, while others look at understudied sites such as Albuquerque, Oahu, and Las Vegas, Nevada. By examining black suburbanization, the Information Age, and gentrification in the urban West, several authors conceive of a Third Great Migration of African Americans to and within the West.

The West revealed in Freedom’s Racial Frontier is a place where black Americans have fought—and continue to fight—to make their idea of freedom live up to their expectations of equality; a place where freedom is still a frontier for most persons of African heritage.

In 1916, Marcus Garvey, a recent immigrant from Jamaica, moved to New York City and established what would quickly become the largest Black mass movement in world history. Garveyism and the Garvey movement had a profound effect on the Black diaspora.In the eastern United States, the official name for Garvey's organization, the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), began with thirteen members in 1916; by the early 1920s, it had more than 700 chapters spread through thirty-eight states. Internationally, there were hundreds of branches stretching across forty-one countries.Garveyism spread throughout the western US in the early 1920s. However, due to the small communities of Blacks who settled in the West, as well as the significant presence of other diverse racial groups, Garveyism on the West Coast looked very different from Garveyism elsewhere. Unlike in other geographic locations, Garveyites on the West Coast worked in conjunction with non-Black groups, which included East Indians, Mexicans, Pacific Islanders, and Asians. These multiracial leaders contributed to the western Garvey movement and spoke at UNIA chapter meetings, as their own nationalist movements corresponded with the rise of this popular Black nationalist movement.Whereas Garveyites on the East Coast fought constantly with the NAACP and the Urban League, these groups did indeed work together sporadically on the West Coast. Surveillance records from the American government provide evidence of the complex multiracial connections that occurred in the American West.While most scholarly research on Garvey has to this point examined the factions of the movement on the East Coast, Roose seeks to expand our knowledge of how we view Black nationalism, drawing out the complexity of the multicultural and multiracial Garvey movement as it existed on the West Coast. Black Star Rising offers new dimensions to conversations on race in the United States, Black nationalist movements, and multicultural organizing in the American West.